Birds enter structures such as retail stores, warehouses, manufacturing facilities, and other high ceiling environments via shopping cart doors, loading docks, human entrances, and other openings in the structures. Birds typically enter commercial structures in hot, cold, or rainy weather to optimize their comfort and often teach other birds methods of ingress in the buildings. Seasonal migration can compound the problem.
Birds carry many diseases and pose direct health risks to employees and customers when they enter build structures, and present a risk of contamination to food in such environments. Techniques such as flushing, mist netting and harvesting are used in many commercial environments to remove wild birds from the interior of the structures and release them outside of the structure. Flushing can be accomplished by employees at the structure, but is relatively ineffective—particularly when a bird has been within the structure for more than forty-eight (48) hours. Mist netting and harvesting are techniques which must be performed by professional pest-control technicians, and can cost between $450 to $8000 for each service and depending upon the number of birds removed. In addition to the out-of-pocket costs for pest-control technicians to remove birds from buildings, in the case of a retail store, the store has to be shut down while pest-control technicians are working. In the case of a 24-hour retail business, a loss of sales and productivity occurs. Such store closings in the aggregate may mean a loss of millions or tens of millions of dollars per year even if the store closings occur late at night or in early morning hours (e.g., midnight to 6 a.m.).
A number of devices have been developed for trapping, capturing and/or isolating birds utilizing various methods of attractants, such as food and/or water. Food is typically not an ideal attractant in retail stores and other similar environments due to the ample supplies of easily accessible open food sources within such environments. Water, on the other hand, is typically in greater demand in such environments. Thus, open sources of water can be a very strong attractant in such environments. Nevertheless, devices of the prior art are not very successful in utilizing a water supply to attract birds for capture, particularly in large building structures in which birds may typically not recognize the fact that a source of water is located within the device unless the birds come in extremely close proximity to or even are captured within the device. For example, US Patent Application Pubs. 2006/0156616 and 2006/0156995 of William P. Ried, incorporated herein by reference in their entireties, both disclose devices for capturing birds within a holding pen. The device includes a waterer assembly in the holding pen in which water is heated to prevent it from freezing and held in an enclosed storage area. The assembly includes a plurality of drip tubes that extend into the storage area to provide water to birds within the storage area. The diameters of the drip tubes are sized such that water is drawn into the drip tubes through capillary action. Thus, unless a bird is in extremely close proximity to the waterer of Ried, such that the bird can see the water forming on the end of the drip tubes, the bird has no way to recognize that it can find water within the device of Ried. Therefore, it would be beneficial to provide a device and/or methods of capturing birds in which birds can easily recognize and be attracted toward a source of water from a distance.
A number of prior art devices such as bird baths, feeders and livestock watering troughs utilize the sonic and/or dynamic characteristics of water to either attract birds to those devices and entice them to eat or drink from the devices. Examples of such devices are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,149,490 to English, and U.S. Patent Application Pubs. 2005/0217605 of Reusch et al. and 2008/021072 of Walkas, the entire disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference. Nevertheless, none of these devices provide any mechanism for capturing birds, nor a mechanism to utilize the water attractant to lure the birds into a holding area. Therefore, it would be beneficial to provide a device and/or methods that captures birds and that utilizes the sonic and/or dynamic characteristics of water to lure birds into a holding area.